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Thursday, December 12, 2013

States With Stronger Alcohol Policies Have Lower Rates of Binge Drinking

States with stronger alcohol control policies have lower
rates of binge drinking than states with weaker policies, a new study
concludes.Researchers gave scores to states based on how they implemented 29 alcohol control policies, HealthDay
reports. States that had higher policy scores were one-fourth as likely
to have a binge drinking rate in the top 25 percent of states, compared
with states with lower scores. Binge drinking rates were 33 percent
higher in states in the bottom quarter than those in the top quarter of
policy scores.States with larger increases in policies had larger decreases in
binge drinking over time, the study found. Binge drinking is responsible
for more than half of the 80,000 alcohol-related deaths in the United
States annually, the article notes. It is generally defined as having
more than four to five alcoholic drinks in a two-hour period.“If alcohol policies were a newly discovered gene, pill or vaccine,
we’d be investing billions of dollars to bring them to market,” study
senior author Dr. Tim Naimi, Associate Professor of Medicine at Boston
University Schools of Medicine and attending physician at Boston Medical
Center, said in a news release.The researchers report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine
that alcohol policy scores varied by as much as threefold between
states. “Unfortunately, most states have not taken advantage of these
policies to help drinkers consume responsibly, and to protect innocent
citizens from the devastating secondhand effects and economic costs from
excessive drinking,” Naimi said.While previous studies have investigated the effect of individual
alcohol policies, the researchers said this is the first study to look
at the effect of the overall alcohol policy environment.